This post is not about Jerry Falwell Jr. watching the pool boy have sex with his (Jerry’s) wife

We’re not going to stoop to posting that kind of salacious content here at LGM because we’re just a whole lot classier than that. Also we like to go meta (not there’s anything wrong with that):

The plutocrats who have more or less controlled the Republican party ever since the previous Gilded Age have always had a serious problem, which is that their primary and indeed practically singular policy goal of making really rich people even richer should as a practical matter not work very well in anything even vaguely resembling a democracy.

The strategies for dealing with this awkward fact have been essentially threefold:

(1) Deny that you care far more about making rich people richer than you care about anything else.

(2) Claim that making rich people richer is actually good for everyone.

(3) Deflect attention from your plutocratic maneuverings by constantly inflaming the cultural resentments of non-rich white people.

From the 1930s until about the 1970s strategy (1) was dominant, as plutocrats were, relatively speaking, running scared and lying low. (Paul Fussell wrote an interesting little book in the early 1980s about the American class system, in which he labeled the highest class “Top Out of Sight.” He pointed out that in recent decades extremely rich people had gone to great pains not to advertise their extreme wealth, probably because of various unpleasant developments around the world between 1917 and 1948 or so).

In the 1980s Strategy (2) became dominant, as Trickle Down Economics and paeans to the salubrious cultural effects of greed were everywhere.

But over the last three decades Strategy (3) has crowded out the first two, to the point where the former tropes might as well not even exist any more. It’s all paranoid delusional white person resentment all the time.

. . . shame on our commenters for posting things like this in this thread:

Let he who has not made an fortune running a billion dollar non-profit boiler room cum “Christian University” that obsessively monitors the romantic inclinations of its marks students, while recording three-ways between his wife, his wife’s hot young Latin lover, and himself, cast the first stone.